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Published: October 12th 2014
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So at my last post I was sitting in the departures gate at Seattle airport. The flight to Honolulu went fine. There wasn't a video player on the back of the seats, but you could rent a player (which I didn't bother with). Our seats were two and two together, so Andrew and I sat together, and we both managed to get a little sleep on the way over. As we approached Hawaii, they served us a free Mai Tai as a welcome, which was bitter and I wasn't too much of a fan. I'm more of a beer and cider drinker (not that you are necessarily interested in my alcohol intake, but there you go anyway). We landed early at 10pm (scheduled 1045), apparently because the trade winds caused a tail wind which sped the plane up a little (we were very tired by this point, because there is a 3 hour difference between pacific standard time and Hawaii time). Actually there's a two time zone difference, but Hawaii doesn't use daylight savings time, so three hours. We took the rental car shuttle to Dollar car rental and picked up a very small nissan versa. It was a glorified golf
Island air flight to Maui
We were just taxiing away from Honolulu airport as the Island air crew wave us off. cart if ever I saw one, but we squeezed all our luggage and selves into it and headed to Waikiki, thanks to the Garmin gps. The hotel looked nice, it was a little hard to find parking, but ended up in a slightly sketchy looking parkade around the corner for $10 for the night (the hotel was charging $25, what a scam!). We walked through an alley to get to the hotel, and in hindsight definately shouldn't have, as with all our luggage we looked like tourists with a giant target on our backs I'm sure, especially late on a Friday night. Anyway, we checked in, with the front desk guy trying his best to joke around with us. He made a few little kid jokes at Jeremy, who glared at him and rolled his eyes. We headed up to the room and immediately slept, as we had a 3:50a.m. wakeup call ahead of us. Unfortunately, because we had to change the flights to Maui to a day later, the only flight there was room on left at 615 am.
I was awake before the wakeup call, being the borderline masochistic morning person that I am. We drove back
to the airport to drop off the glorified golf cart. The annoying part was the 45 minutes for the shuttle to arrive to take us over to the terminal, and even then the guy dropped off all of the other flights first, and I was getting ticked at that point and wondering if we were going to make the flight. We got to the interisland terminal at 540, with 545 boarding. It turned out we were fine, and the panicking was totally unnecessary. Jeremy looks up at me as we walk out of security and says "I prayed about it and it was o.k.". Indeed nephew, indeed. What a great kid.
We took off on time, and it was like Southwest Airlines where you can pick your own seats. The Island Air people were very friendly and the service was good. The views of the islands of Oahu, Molokai, Lanai, and Maui were amazing, and I'll add a few pictures. We landed and got the luggage and rental car and it was only 730am, so we headed to the hippyish Tofino like town of Paia on the north shore of Maui. We went to a bit of a tourist
trappy place called Charlie's that apparently was visited by Willy Nelson. The food was good, and realistically it wasn't any more expensive than the tourist trappy breakfast joints like Floyd's in Victoria. We chatted and tried to relax and let it sink in that after a longish journey here, we were in Hawaii, SO RELAX.
We finished breakfast and drove to Kihei in south maui and went to a beach. Unfortunately there was too much surf break and rip tide, so I wasn't comfortable with Jeremy going in, but he paddled. I dove in for a couple of minutes and floated to cool off, which was very cool (no pun intended). We headed back to Kahalui airport and picked up mum and dad and Rachel, and hit Costco and Walmart for supplies. Rachel and I and Jeremy went in the car we rented and the others headed off in the van to check in at the Sands of Kahana. There was a long line of cars heading around the coast to West Maui, but the views of the surf and surfers and west maui mountains was very cool. We played Israel Kamakawiwo'ole ukele'le music, which was perfect. Livin the
life.
The condo is a timeshare, exchanged from mum and dad's timeshare in Parksville, and was an older building, but a massive 3 bedroom. It has a partial ocean view, and will be great with a space for everyone to get privacy (sort of), laundry, kitchen, kitted out. Rachel and I walked with Jeremy on the beach and we paddled a bit in the waves. Rachel and I then went for a walk on our own, and again let it sink in that we were in paradise together. For all of the stress of the past few weeks, months, and years, God has and had a plan, and I need to trust in that. Life is good. It'll all work out if we all try and keep the faith.
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